


Ghosts

by bellezza



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/F, Future Fic, Gen, Winterfell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-07
Updated: 2013-06-07
Packaged: 2017-12-14 06:11:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/833652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellezza/pseuds/bellezza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rain weeps o'er the halls of Winterfell. </p><p>One-shot, post-series. Largely a Sansa character exploration; shipping is entirely subtext.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> _I’m a ghost_  
>  Haunting these halls  
> Climbing these walls that I never knew were there  
> And I’m lost  
> Broken down the middle of my heart, heart  
> I’m broken down the middle of my heart, heart, heart  
> —"Ghosts," Ingrid Michaelson

Sansa pads through the ruins on silent feet, listening to the empty silence beneath the patter of raindrops. She is alone here but for the company of ghosts: there Bran clambering hand and foot up the south wall, there Robb and Theon and Jon playing at swords in the yard while Rickon shouts encouragement, there Mother looking down from her tower window with her beautiful face crinkled by a smile.

The stout old castle itself is a ghost, its proud towers crumbling, its empty halls gutted by fire. She passes by the skeletal remains of the stable and sees the phantom of a little girl with a long face getting underfoot. At the foot of the maester's turret she pauses, and the dance of light upon the broken glass looks almost like a man peering up at the sky. In the lichyard she pauses at an unmarked grave, and plucks a pearl from her bodice to lay in the rich dark earth.

Petyr was right: there are no happy endings. He learned that lesson best of all.

It feels as if days pass while she wanders, each one as pale grey and chilly-moist as the next. Spring is only barely upon them. Each second is a month, each minute a year. In the end her path takes her to the godswood, a pocket of life inside Winterfell's dead shell, warm as summer, but not warm enough to penetrate the ice under her skin.

Dany finds her sitting beneath the heart tree.

The young queen sits beside Sansa, as silent as the dead lurking about the ruins of her home. Her hand slips into Sansa's, warm and comforting as a fire. The contact thaws her, a little.

"Father used to come here to pray," Sansa says in a quiet voice, though quiet for the wildness around them or for the graveyard surrounding it she could not say. Whatever the case, it does not feel right to disturb the hush that's come to live in Winterfell in place of the laughter she'd once known. "Like his father, and his father's father. The Starks keep the old gods, so Father offered up his prayers before this very tree."

"He must have been a pious man," Dany says, her voice quiet as Sansa's own. _Does she sense it, too? Or does she only follow my lead?_

"I suppose he was," Sansa says. "Though I did not understand for many years why he would take this dank, dark place over the sept, so full of color and light."

"But you do now?"

"I do now. When men wound a wolf, only wild gods can understand a wild heart."

The hand holding her own gives a gentle squeeze, a reassurance. And of course she understands, this she-dragon in a woman's body who is part beast herself. The gods of men might look over men and protect them, but the Northern gods, the wild gods, are what remain when all the hollowness of man's world is stripped away.

"And what do you pray for, Sansa?" Dany asks, in nearly a whisper. The question rings in her mind. Someone else once asked the same of her silent communion with the spirits of the trees. Who--Tyrion, yes. _He asked me what I prayed for, and I could not wholly answer, for my prayers were treason._

"Home," she says. "Yet here I am at last, and my home is gone."

"No," Dany answers, and Sansa finally turns to look away from the weirwood's ageless face to Dany's youthful features. The urgent conviction there makes her heart ache in her chest, just a little. "It's still here. Perhaps not as it once was, but what fire destroys can be made again anew. None know that better than I."

An image comes alive in Sansa's mind then, of a small dark-haired maiden building a castle out of snow. Walls and towers and turrets all rising from the ground, bridges and glass gardens, keeps and kitchens, stables and armory, all coming alive beneath her gloved hands. She sees it so vividly that she can almost feel the falling flakes catching in her lashes, melting on her tongue.

When she blinks, it's gone, and in its place a resolution. She'd known she must rebuild Winterfell, but now the purpose coils through her, like something alive, in the marrow of her bones.


End file.
